Poloniex is a US-based cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in January 2014. The exchange has its headquarter in Whitefish, Montana.

Trading

Even though Poloniex does not have any active fiat markets, the exchange does offer well over a hundred cryptocurrency pairs to trade in. The liquidity on these cryptocurrency pairs is hard to determine but generally not great, given that even the most liquid pairs have bid-ask spreads starting at one percent. Trade execution fees add another 20 basis points in costs per trade. Most cryptocurrencies also cannot be traded directly. Trading Ripples for Litecoins would for example require two trades through Bitcoin, including additional trade costs. Users do get decent control over their trades, as Poloniex supports Stop-Limit orders besides normal Limit orders. As of May 2015 Poloniex also enabled margin trading/short selling.

Poloniex Trading Summary

Item

Details

# Cryptocurrencies

100+

# Fiat currencies

N/A

Trade fees (trade size $1,000)

0.20%

BTC/USD half bid-ask + impact (trade size $1,000)

1%+

Minimum trade size

No

Margin trading

Supported

Derivatives

Not supported

Market orders

Not supported

Advanced orders

Supported

Funding

Without any fiat markets there is little to write with regard to account funding. If you’re using Poloniex you may note that the base currency is USDT, which represents the crytpocurrency Tether. Even though the latter will typically behave like the regular USD, there is additional risk in the fact that it is utilizes a pegged exchange rate.

Poloniex Funding Summary

Item

Details

Cheapest funding method available in

N/A

Cheapest funding method

N/A

Deposit fees (local)

N/A

Withdrawal fees (local)

N/A

Instant deposits possible?

N/A

Bitcoin Deposit fees

Free of charge

Bitcoin Withdrawal fees

Free of charge

Platform

One disadvantage of offering many cryptocurrencies to trade in, is that it becomes harder to keep the platform simple and easy to navigate. Poloniex could have managed this better, as it was not required, for example, to load all markets and the user chat in a sidebar on the trading screen. Overall, the platform is very crowded, but fortunately not that difficult to use.

The website of Poloniex is surprisingly not optimized for mobile platforms, which is something that would be expected from an exchange founded in 2014. The exchange does support two-factor authentication for its user’s accounts.

Help & Support

Poloniex’ FAQ does not exactly contain the content one might expect. Rather than discussing cryptocurrencies or relevant trading information, the FAQ covers coin listings and the so-called Trollbox (user chat). Information on advanced features Stop-Limit order and Margin trading can be found elsewhere, offering some compensation to the previous. The exchange also does not have much of a support desk to approach for any further assistance, as users can only leave a support ticket.

Legitimacy

The company’s legitimacy has been evaluated with the help of a Fraud Risk Assessment. A summary is provided below, and the full assessment can be found by following this link.

Item

Number

Red flags

4

Warnings

1

A weighting factor of 40% is applied to legitimacy in calculating the final rating. A weighting factor of 25% is applied to both trading and funding, while a weighting factor of only 15% is applied to both platform and support. If the legitimacy score is 0% then the total rating is automatically set to the lowest possible result.